Cashing in on a trending or hot topic has been an old trick. When the trending Kolaveri Di was released, we also saw another bunch of Kolaveri’s tailored in different tastes and languages being served to us, same is the story of Pintile. We have read about Pinterest, the hottest social network of 2012 as yet and trying to cash in this moment is Pintile, a clone of Pinterest that has been launched recently by two Indians. The only USP of Pintile for the moment is that it is very much Indian and caters to Indian tastes.

Login Page

The features and the working methodology of Pintile is more or less same as Pinterest. Pintile allows you to log in via Facebook and Google but to do so you would require an invite. Would have loved if they could have kept it without an invite; this could have led to more signups. Once you are in the product as a user you can upload a new pin, fetch a pin, video and boards the same way you can do in Pinterest. However I tried fetching a pin but it failed to respond.

Main Page

Apart from this, the categories are same as it has been displayed in Pinterest but the only thing Pintile has done is listing some boards that will interest Indians such as Bollywood, Cricket, Politics and Humor. Apart from this everything else is same as Pinterest.

User profile

Some questions to the Founders:

Pintile has been conceptualized and developed by Fizzy Software founded in 2007 by Sudhanshu Aggarwal and Ashish Sharma. I know that building a product is not child’s play but then why blindly copy something that is exciting. So as a user I have some questions to the founders.

1. Why the design has been blindly copied?

2. Your USP is of being an Indian product but then what is so Indian about this product?

3. Are you stopping non-Indians to join the community or are you accepting only content that is Indian?

I don’t have the numbers for how many active users are logging and spending time on Pintile but it fails to appeal to me. It just doesn’t give me a reason why I should spend time on it. For that matter Pinterest is also becoming a spam network for me. However that is entirely a different topic.

The other thing that comes to my mind is that one can have clones in the market. For example lets see the brilliant example of Burrp and Zomato. Both are more or less competing in the same space but then they both give some different value, that’s why they are stiffly competing in the same space.

If Pintile can give me a way to curate my interests then I am going to be keen about it. This is a problem that I have noticed exists on Pinterest too. I can’t curate content right now on Pinterest and that’s why it has turned spam for me. So, if Pintile can make some new enhancement then I am sure it can catch up on the popularity charts. But until then I fail to find any reason to use it.